The torture doctors (UPDATED)

So if I cared to spend $30, I could read the article in the AMA's journal about the CIA's torture doctors. (Does the AMA get any federal grant support? I firmly believe all public funding in future should carry a requirement of free internet access to published articles.) But I don't, for the time being at least.

So here's a quote:

The CIA Office of Medical Services

* purported to subject some techniques to "medical limitations," but those claimed limitations imposed no constraint on use of torture, e.g., allowing weight loss up to serious malnutrition, noise up to level of permanent hearing damage, exposure to cold water right up to development of hypothermia, shackling in upright sitting or horizontal position for 48 hours (and longer with medical monitoring);

* placed no medical limitations at all on the use of isolation, hooding, walling, cramped confinement or stress positions except in some cases avoidance of aggravation of pre-existing injury;

* ignored medical and other literature on effects of these forms of torture, and instead cited sources like NIH web site, wilderness manuals and WHO guidelines.

* recognized dangers of certain enhanced methods but nevertheless approved them, e.g., that waterboarding risks drowning, aspiration pneumonia, and laryngospasm; sleep deprivation can degrade cognitive performance, lead to visual disturbances and reduce immune competence acutely; prolonged standing can induce dependent edeme, increased risk for DVT, cellulitis.

Medical ethics.

... More from Scott Horton:

The duplicity in this affair is amazingly circular. The Justice Department’s torture lawyers relied on the CIA’s torture doctors for the conclusion that specific techniques did not produce “severe pain” that ran afoul of the criminal law prohibition on torture; the CIA doctors relied on the Justice Department lawyers for the same conclusion. It looks like a compact, and an alert prosecutor would no doubt call it a joint criminal enterprise: I’ll shield you, and you’ll shield me. But the conduct of the OMS involves laughable games with the ethics requirements. The obligation to “do no harm,” the physician’s foremost ethical injunction, is converted by OMS into an injunction to avoid “severe pain.” In other words, in the OMS’s book, anything that falls one iota short of prosecutable torture, including cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (which is also prosecutable) is just fine. It’s hard to see at this point whose behavior was the more ethically odious, though evidence suggests that both engaged in professional misconduct so egregious as to warrant formal disciplinary proceedings.

Torture -- the new "professional misconduct." Hell, I thought that was putting my client's funds in the wrong bank account.